|
|
|
|
|
BOOK
REVIEW
The soul of a city
Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found by
Suketu Mehta
Reviewed by Sreeram Chaulia
Capturing the essence of a metropolis of the mythic
proportions of Bombay (renamed Mumbai in 1995) is no easy
task. Journalist Suketu Mehta's debut offering stalks the
soul of India's soulless mahanagar (great city)
through the medium of the lives of its heterogeneous
residents. The Bombay that emerges from Mehta's personality
portraits is greater than the sum of its components, a
celebration.
Home to 14 million people, Bombay has a "tight claim" on
Mehta's heart. When he moved to New York as a teenager, "I
missed Bombay like an organ of my body". (p 8) He
"re-approximated Bombay" in Jackson Heights, "taking little
memory trains" of Hindi films and music. He returned to
Bombay on skittish trips to fall in love and marry, but
nursed the itch to live in the city of his childhood again.
This book is the end product of a nostalgic journey to
revisit roots.
Impossible city
Bombay culture is characterized by dhandha
(transaction). The ethic of Bombay is quick enrichment. A
well-executed scam is considered "a thing of beauty".
Mehta's ancestors changed caste centuries ago from Brahmin
to Vaisya to adapt to "a naturally capitalistic city - one
that understands the moods and movements of money". (p 21)
Caste-consciousness pervades the city, with a hierarchy even
among upper-middle-class-flat servants. "It is as difficult
to move down the caste ladder as it is to move up." (p 37)
In Bombay, Mehta has to relearn how to stand in line to
vote, buy a house, find a job, leave the country, make a
train reservation or phone call or answer nature's call. In
the absence of money or connections, the only way to get
anything done here is anger. Bombay air has 10 times the
maximum permissible levels of lead in the atmosphere, the
equivalent of smoking two-and-a-half packs of cigarettes a
day. London and Paris are re-created in miniature among the
charmed set of Bombay. "The First World lives smack in the
center of the Third." Billionaires and repulsive deprivation
abide in the city where violence and muscle power can strike
without warning.
Hindu, Muslim
Mehta meets a deputy leader of the Hindu-nationalist Shiv
Sena party who took his sick daughter to a Muslim exorcist
for cure, a healer of the same community that he massacred
and burned during the 1993 communal riots. "For Bombayites,
business comes first. They are individually multiple." (p
46) The Shiv Sena goon confesses, "Sometimes I couldn't
sleep, thinking that just as I have burned someone, somebody
could burn me." (p 48)
The riots provided a recruitment bonanza for the Muslim
underworld and set off serial bomb blasts. Most Muslim boys
from shanty localities joined the Dawood Ibrahim gang. Mehta
interviews Muslim women whose men were shot and stabbed by
the police or the Sena. They protest love for their city and
country, come what may. "If there is hope for Bombay, it is
in this group of slum women." (p 59)
The Sena wrested political power for a Marathi underclass.
"The monster came out of the slums." (p 61) The new
inheritors were uneducated, unscrupulous and lacking of
Bombay's cosmopolitan sensibility. They took the keys to the
city from the erstwhile elites - Parsis, Gujaratis, Punjabis
and Marwaris - who were left ruing the loss of the "gracious
city". Mehta has an audience with Sena supremo Bal
Thackeray, a man who is obsessed with Muslims, and who loves
big business and Bollywood. He is the remote control that
orders young angry men to go out and lay waste whole
communities or to render an illegal slum permanent and
legal.
Thackeray constantly channels the violent energy of his boys
to attack painters, Ghazal singers, filmmakers, cricket
infrastructure and Valentine's Day revelers. For the Sena
minions, "all the accumulated insults, rebukes and
disappointments of life come out in a cathartic release of
anger". (p 95) Thackeray opines that Bombay can be saved
only through migration control. "Retaliation is our
birthright," he thunders. The Sena is primarily a party of
exclusion, alleging that this or that group does not belong
to Bombay.
Thackeray boasts to Mehta that if he is ever arrested,
"India could burn. This is a call for religious riots and
everybody should prepare for the consequences." (p 118)
Realty horror
Bombay is choking because of the 1948 Rent Act and the
all-powerful tenants lobby. Those who arrive newly have no
room to rent because the middle class and rich have a lock
on all the best properties. New construction is avoided by
builders because of fears of expropriation of property. The
annual deficit of 45,000 houses adds to the ranks of the
slums. "The city is full of people claiming what's not
theirs." (p 128) Reorientation plans to building easterly
meet stiff resistance. Bombay's direction is typically
westward.
Half the population lacks toilets. The sanitation crisis is
compounded by the "national defect in the Indian character -
absence of a civic sense." (p 138) Traffic snarls
notwithstanding, the roads committee spends its time on a
renaming frenzy to pander to political whims.
Mafia kingdom
The Bombay underworld is an "overworld". Gangsters refer to
bases in Karachi, Dubai and Malaysia as upar (above)
and Bombay as neeche (below). Dons and hit-men engage
in international ping-pong games of murder. "The culture of
gang war is intrinsic to the culture of the city." (p 156)
Bombay is the bull's-eye of cross-border economic
aggression, pumped by Islamabad-printed counterfeit
Indian-currency notes. "If India has to be hit financially,
crippling Bombay is a must." (p 170)
Only 60% of the city's police have housing, making it
impossible for a constable to evict a slumlord. Police are
given the worst lawyers to prosecute crime syndicates, while
gangs have the best. Police torture is a "necessary spur in
the absence of a functioning judiciary". (p 198). One daring
cop tells Mehta, "The judicial system is so tilted in favor
of the accused that he is not at all afraid." Gangs thrive
in Bombay to make up for judicial inadequacies. Police
chiefs are themselves beholden to the dons. They call up
gangsters and ask ransom for releasing arrested
sharpshooters. In 1999, a senior Bombay judge himself
approached the underworld to recover dues from a debtor.
A hit-man of the "D Company" gang appraises the benefits of
his work. "If someone shoots me, at least one lakh
[Rp100,000, about US$2,300 at the current exchange rate]
will come to my home. I only have to open my mouth to get
money. If I want a car for a while, it is arranged." In
jail, the company sends Rp7,000 a month for personal
expenses and Rp10,000 for his family. A budding don hiding
in Dubai says that the bhai (gang lord) cares for his
family in Bombay through thick or thin.
Underworld figures are god-fearing. "God is the biggest
bhai." (p 226) One shooter maintains, "God is like
smelling money that you've earned." The bullet business is
God's game. In Mehta's talk with Chotta Shakeel, the D
Company lodestar, the latter displays a heavy sense of
involvement in wrong. "What is wrong is wrong. A sin is a
sin." (p 267) Hit-men, like the Sena boys, feel more
powerful by killing. They imbibe their victims' power. Their
"character is defined above all by narcissism, that complex
mix of egotism and self-hatred". (p 247)
Epicure's city
Bombay is the vadapav (local fast food) eaters' city.
It is the lunch of chawl dwellers, cart pullers,
street urchins, clerks, cops and gangsters. The bar-line
world of nightclubs is unique to Bombay. In this most
commercial of cities, the beer bar is the definitive place
where the color of money talks. Customers sustain an
illusion of individuality by starring in their own
custom-made Hindi chartbuster in which dancers pretend to be
in love with them. Inferiority complexes and false-man egos
are satiated in the bars, where money is liberally debased.
Dancers feel guilty for this profession, since they "exploit
men's human need for comfort". (p 317). They are caught
between two worlds, one they aspire to and one they wish to
leave but cannot.
The city hums and throbs with sexual energy and the frenzy
of a closed society. No one need be lonely or frustrated
here. "Bombay has a service for every need." (p 490) Mehta
observes a "tremendous current of homosexual desire in the
metropolis that lies to itself about its origins". (p 362)
Reel world
Bollywood is fundamentally a "mass dream of the audience,
and Bombay is a mass dream of the peoples of India". (p
457). Through the movies, Indians have been living in Bombay
lifelong without having to set foot into the mahanagar.
Millions of Indians dream of a future in Bombay celluloid.
Audiences take their films seriously and can ransack
theaters. Directors cannot afford subtlety lest it go over
the heads of the irascible viewers. India now deals with
threats to its integrity through Bollywood's outlandish
scenes of bombings and terrorists in league with cap-toting
politicians. War onscreen is not all that serious. "There
will always be a break in the fighting for love and song."
(p 449) Sensitive films on communal tensions get hobbled by
Censor Board "A" (adult) certificates.
Bollywood music today relies on electronic instruments,
African rhythms and voices. "Like Hinduism, all who come to
invade it are absorbed, digested and regurgitated." (p 403)
The secular film industry is dominated by Punjabi and Sindhi
entrepreneurs and financed by movie-besotted bhais.
Without the underworld, Bollywood would be "nowhere near as
extravagant, as violent, as passionate." (p 454)
The city's pulse
As a child, Mehta recalls the monsoon's onset as the only
event in Bombay weather. Clouds carried "dispatches from
someone unknown to us to somebody whom we could never talk
to". (p 468) On a visit to his school to come to terms with
"nine years of my ghost time", he is afraid that a boy might
bump into him in the corridor and "see himself". Starving
waifs on the roads evoke a desperate sadness in the author.
"In Bombay, every day is an assault on the individual's
senses." (p 508)
The sidewalks and slums of Bombay are strewn with little
lives that share sparse room for living, sleeping, cooking
and dining. Invisibility is bestowed upon them, though
privacy is unthinkable. Battles over the footpath are
battles over rights of pedestrians, hawkers, vehicle owners
and the homeless. The poor speak of the very poor with
vehemence and the ascending classes feel those below them
have "too much power". One professor remarks that in Bombay,
"you are always comparing yourself with others". (p 527)
Bombay may be hectic and breakneck in nature, but not
competitive. In apartments or commuter trains, Bombayites
have no option but to habituate and adjust. They shrink
personal space to expand collective space and retain empathy
for fellow inmates. The sense of community that binds the
city is rural. "Bombay is a collection of people from
villages who seek to recreate the village." (p 549). It is
not a dying city, but one filled with incandescent life
force. It allows people to live close to their "seductive
extremities" and still merge into a singular consciousness.
Suketu Mehta's travelogue through the mahanagar is as
sweet and tangy as the city itself. Flavored for readers of
every taste just like the crispy vadapav, Maximum City
is a magnificent achievement.
Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found by Suketu Mehta.
Penguin Books India, New Delhi, September 2004. ISBN:
0-67-004921-2. Price US$13.25; 585 pages.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
Please contact us for information on
sales, syndication and
republishing.) |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
All material on
this website is copyright and may not be republished in any form
without written permission.
© Copyright 1999 -
2005 Asia Times Online Ltd.
|
|
Head Office: Rm 202, Hau Fook Mansion, No. 8 Hau Fook
St., Kowloon, Hong Kong
Thailand Bureau: 11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab
Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
|
|
|
|
